When we reached our target that night—a nice house furnished with a chandelier, comfortable furniture, and an actual heater, which made our night much more pleasant—we cleared it quickly and took up positions on the roof and on upper floors. When we tried to blow spider holes in the wall for our snipers, however, we found it was too thick for our explosive charges. We couldn’t even scratch it. Our resourceful snipers managed to work around that little problem and had a productive day.
Around 11:00 p.m. that night, a long day’s work done, Lieutenant Nathan made the call to pull Gold squad out and return to our COP. We took some fire from down the street, including some heavy stuff. When we called for our return ride, we were hoping for Bradleys. Instead, we got Abrams tanks. Nothing against those big armored beasts—they were your best friend in a heavy fight—but they weren’t what we wanted for a lift. There was no room inside to carry us. So we formed up in columns and jogged along behind the tanks, doing what we call the Mogadishu Mile. During the whole exhausting slog, spirits stayed high. I remember guys joking about who was going to step on the first IED.
We speculated who would fly the farthest, propelled by the blast. “If you’re going to go,” someone said, “you should do it with distance, and style points.”
On November 15, Blue squad went out to set up a pair of sniper positions in south-central Ramadi. It was a bait op, our favorite kind of mission. We almost always drew fire, and whenever we did, we gave it back tenfold. This time, though, the insurgents changed the way they came at us. Seems they had learned they couldn’t outshoot our snipers, so early on the first morning, the enemy located the sniper hide and probed it with small arms fire. The guys gave far better than they got and held their position, but by midafternoon, both overwatch locations came under heavy attack. The enemy couldn’t outshoot us, but he could use his familiarity with the streets to sneak up on our positions.
Marty Robbins was walking up the stairs to the roof with an armload of water bottles for him and his partner on the roof, when the frags started landing. At least three of these old-fashioned German potato mashers came flipping end over end into the snipers’ midst. One of them hit Robbins square in the crotch, bounced to the ground at his feet, and started rolling toward his teammate. With seconds to act, thinking he was a dead man, Robbins hollered, “Grenade!” then kicked that one away, keeping it from his buddy, then dropped his load of water and dove toward the stairs just as the grenades went off. Another SEAL, a chief by the name of Mulder, hit the deck of the roof and curled up tight. When the grenades exploded, they sent a storm of shrapnel into both men’s feet and the backs of their legs. The blast slammed Robbins into the door frame as he tried to dive through it, and he tumbled down the stairs. Amazingly, both men made it out of there under their own power in spite of their wounds. It was an incredible lifesaving reaction, and a heroic act. After suppressing the attack and doing triage on the wounded members of his fire team (with no thought to himself), Robbins called the QRF—the quick reaction force.
As the other sniper overwatch position came under attack—that team got into a full-on grenade-lobbing contest with the enemy—two Bradleys pulled up. It was the QRF. Unfortunately, it arrived in front of the wrong house. Robbins and Mulder were forced to run for it. Under fire the whole time, the two wounded SEALs made it all the way over there. As they piled in to the rear compartment, the Brads turned their powerful chain guns on the house that Robbins and Mulder had exfilled from and tore it down, concrete block by concrete block.
I was working on the mission plan for the next night when they returned to camp—twelve hours sooner than we were expecting them. They had gotten a rough lesson in what awaited us in south-central. We were lucky we didn’t lose anyone that night. The enemy was getting brave. We decided that next time out, things would roll differently.
9
Frogman Down
We had a big operation planned for the night of November 18–19—a push into the hottest part of the southern area of the city, the Ma’laab district. It was high time for us to shake the bushes and see what came crawling out.
We were rolling out heavy. Gold squad’s two fire teams would set up sniper positions protecting tankers from the First Battalion, Seventy-Seventh Armor Regiment, based at Camp Ramadi, and the infantry from the First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment, known as the Manchus, based at Camp Corregidor, as they went block by block, yanking the enemy out by the roots. We found out during planning that Bravo Platoon was putting in three sniper positions of their own in the neighborhood, too. They moved out from Camp Corregidor to COP Eagle’s Nest, and then infilled on foot into Ma’laab—labeled the “Papa sectors” on our map—where they would set up three more positions to our east.
Running a daylight block-clearance op in the Ma’laab district was an easy way to get into a fight. Located about half a mile southwest of the soccer stadium, the neighborhood was densely residential and widely feared by the locals. Moose and Riddick, our terps, shook their heads at the mere mention of the place. “It’s baaad news down there, man.”
I wanted nothing more than to have my rifle in that fight. With Robbins and Mulder still nursing shredded glutes, we all wanted payback. But I wouldn’t be going out with them—I was on “injured reserve,” because my back was a mess. Senior Chief Steffen had some good advice. “Just step back a little, Marcus.” He was a man of few words, but these were the ones I needed to hear. He let me know that the guys had it covered, that I could take a moment to heal. In the teams, it seems like we all take a heavy load on our shoulders, feeling like we need to be there at all times to help our brothers. It never hurt to have a reminder about the strength of our team and the capabilities of the men in it, and know that they would be good without me. The teams never depend on a single person—ever. If they try to, what can happen is not far from what happens to a sports team that relies too heavily on a single guy: there’s no chemistry, and they’re set up perfectly for failure. We have no use for glory hounds, either.
We shuffled our team leads. Wink took Gold squad and, with Marty Robbins down, Senior Chief took over the chief spot in Blue. I already thought he was one of the best frogmen I’d ever worked with, but when he returned to the train, taking the place of a wounded comrade, it was business as usual. I knew it was going to be a busy night, and it sucked to see the boys roll out while we had to stay back. Marty and I would make our contributions in different ways. (Just call me the paper bitch.) One way or another, we were determined to collect on debts that night.
Gold squad, under Lieutenant Nathan—with Wink as his platoon chief, six other frogs, and our JTAC, Fizbo—loaded up at Camp Marc Lee and took a fast convoy to COP Iron. Staging there, they pushed out on foot around 2300 local time on November 18. Carrying enough food and water for two days, they patrolled eastward, along the base of a stone embankment supporting the railroad tracks that marked the city’s southern boundary. The nearly full moon was throwing out more light than the sun, but it was good that Fizbo was with them. Using his radio, he kept in close touch with aircraft overhead. Their infrared eyes were lifesavers, their air-to-ground weapons game changers in a pinch.
Coming to an intersection, Gold squad crossed the railroad tracks and patrolled north into the southern part of the Ma’laab district. Moving like smoke through the nighttime streets, they advanced through a maze of narrow alleyways threading between houses made of brick and mud. Stepping over trash and avoiding sewer pits, they could hear people stirring in the houses as they passed. If they weren’t careful, they’d end up facedown in a sewer. But unwanted noise—the foul-smelling splash—could exact a price far higher than a soiled uniform.
Continuing north, they passed a schoolhouse. Littered with small arms, tools for making bombs, and bloody whips and other instruments of interrogation and torture, it had been recently used as an Al Qaeda playground. When some dogs began to bark and a donkey began to bray, Gold thought they might have been compromised. Hairs rose on the backs o
f their necks as they pushed the mission ahead. I know what that feels like; the fear that you might have been compromised can be worse than the actual knowledge of it.
When they finally reached their target, a neighborhood spanning five or six city blocks, they split into two groups and moved to their overwatch positions. Nathan’s team entered and cleared a house situated just north of the school. Austin and his boys approached a four-story structure located five houses to the east, on a street corner. With eight guys in the upper floors of each house, they were ready to go to work.
Come morning, around eight thirty, Fizbo and a sniper we called Noise were watching the schoolyard to the south when they saw a line of about ten cars driving past the house. Each time a car went by, the driver leaned on the horn. As they felt the hackles rise on the backs of their necks, Noise and Fizbo agreed that if any of the cars stopped, they’d bring their rifles to bear and light it up. Everyone in Ramadi understood the threat of vehicle-borne IEDs. The only way to stop one was to shoot the driver before he got close enough to clack it off. Sure enough, one of the cars stopped in front of the house.
Noise, Fizbo, and another frog flipped their safeties and were about to fire when a guy came running out of a house across the way and jumped into the car. It sped off. Then they saw a woman in the open field near the school digging with a shovel. She reached down and pulled several sacks out of the ground, the contents of which the snipers couldn’t see, then began passing them into the passenger-side windows of cars driving by. Noise pulled his scope to his eye, took aim, and put a round into one of the bags. He thought it might explode, but it didn’t. The suspects scattered, quickly escaping Noise’s field of fire, and their suspicious activity ceased.
From his rooftop hide, Adam Downs was watching the block to his northeast when an enemy sniper drew a bead on him and fired. The round hit the wall about six inches from his head. Adam returned fire immediately, zeroing on the flash, then displaced, running down the stairs. He was pissed off.
There was no time to dwell on near misses, though, because Lieutenant Austin’s boys, five houses to the east, reported half a dozen insurgents leaving a nearby house, on the move north. In this neighborhood the homes were packed so closely together that you could run across the roofs from house to house. Each structure was set back from the street a pretty good distance and had a tall, thick stucco wall between it and the street. This made each house a natural fighting position, but it also meant that anyone outside could sneak up on the house unseen, hidden by the wall.
Though his squad lost sight of the enemy force, Fizbo was able to pick them up using the airborne camera of a Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet on station overhead. The insurgents ran west through an alleyway three blocks north of his position, hauling heavy weapons and ammunition. It looked like a flanking maneuver. Passing seven houses, the insurgents finally stopped at the northeast corner of an open field about three city lots wide.
Fizbo contacted the Army commander and requested permission to have the Marine Corps pilot make a strafing run. The commander told Fizbo that strafing was prohibited in densely populated neighborhoods, so our JTAC doubled down, contacting his new friends in brigade headquarters at Camp Ramadi and asking for even heavier ordnance.
Meanwhile, Dozer, the JTAC from Bravo Platoon, asked Fizbo to have the Hornet scan the neighborhood around their house a hundred yards in all directions. It seems the element from Bravo Platoon had had quite an adventure patrolling into the city the previous night. They rode in Bradleys from Camp Corregidor to the edge of the district, then dismounted and went on foot. Led by Elliott Miller, their point man and medic, they twice had to find alternate routes when Dozer told them that a pilot had detected hot spots on the road. These were likely newly emplaced IEDs. So now the Hornet pilot reported that no one was moving in the streets, but there was a cluster of suspicious vehicles gathering a few blocks to the north.
It was hard for a single aircraft to serve many customers at once. A pilot couldn’t, for instance, watch the streets surrounding Bravo while also lining up an air attack somewhere else. In addition, the pilot had to worry about the perpetual thirst of a modern military aircraft. After scanning Dozer’s area, he came back on line saying that he needed to leave station momentarily to refuel from an airborne tanker.
Fizbo used the short break to double-check the tactical situation and finalize his request for an air strike. Known as a nine line, the request specified the coordinates the aircraft should hit and the type of weapon to be used, and confirmed compliance with the rules of engagement. To avoid collateral damage, headquarters ended up giving Fiz a Laser Maverick—a laser-guided air-to-ground missile—instead of the more powerful five-hundred-pound bomb that he preferred. When Fizbo’s Marine Corps brother returned from refueling, he scanned the area again and reported that the enemy force had doubled in size. There were about a dozen fighters ready to move out and attack. The guys couldn’t afford to wait for headquarters to decide what to do with Fizbo’s nine line.
Wink used data from the plane’s camera to find his target, then, as a pair of his teammates began laying down automatic weapons fire on the insurgents’ building, four other operators began lobbing 40mm grenades. Their aim was true. The aircraft reported several direct hits, and a number of wounded fighters crawled away from the field. Fizbo passed corrections to the grenadiers and more frags flew. By the time they were finished, no one was left in the field. The survivors had crawled (or were dragged) into a house just to its east.
The teams were only getting warmed up. Adam Downs pulled out the heaviest weapon in the platoon’s arsenal, a recoilless rifle that we call a Carl Gustav, heaved it to his shoulder, and sent an 84mm rocket downrange. It slammed into an empty house that stood between them and their quarry. Equipped with a time-delayed fuse, the projectile punched through the empty house and exploded in the neighboring house a split second later, after it had penetrated the wall between them.
The pilot promptly reported an explosion in the house where the enemy was holed up. Fizbo, standing in a stairwell in Lieutenant Nathan’s sniper’s nest, updated his nine line to make that new house the Hornet’s target. As he awaited approval, Wink turned loose another Carl G. with a fiery roar. The backblast blew out the windows around him and shook the house. The Marine Corps pilot reported another direct hit on the enemy’s hidey-hole, and told Fizbo that four insurgents were hauling ass, running south into the next house. Our JTAC relayed this to Wink, who sent another Carl G. to visit the next house.
In spite of the SEALs’ deadly handiwork, the Hornet pilot told Fizbo that an even larger group of insurgents than before, as many as twenty of them, was in a house just north of the one Wink had hit. It was then, finally, that Fizbo got approval to unleash the Hornet’s heavy weapons. He verified the coordinates and confirmed compliance with the rules of engagement for close air support missions. Then he contacted the pilot, verifying the target and the weapon of choice, and finally spoke the magic words into his microphone:
“Cleared hot.”
Hustling in from the south, the aircraft dropped a Laser Maverick from the rails. “Rifle,” the pilot announced. Fizbo told his teammates to duck and cover.
When that delta-winged weapon hit, its three-hundred-pound warhead detonated with a thudding roar, cloaking half a city block in a cloud of dust. When it began to clear, the guys could see that much of the target building was gone. The pilot reported seven insurgents escaping to another building across the street. That left, of course, more than a dozen bad guys buried inside the house. When brigade headquarters denied Fizbo’s request to use another missile, Wink and his rocket team were on the survivors like sand on a BUD/S student, throwing another Carl G. at them and scattering those who were still somehow ambulatory into the northern part of the neighborhood.
It was a hell of a satisfying hour’s work, the kind of thing that SEAL teams, and regular soldiers and Marines, do every day. You seldom see it in the papers. Once in a while some guys
get put up for decorations and a ceremony takes place somewhere. You see them in dress uniforms, standing proud. But that’s politics and theater. You should see them as I have, downrange, in action. They’re amazing to watch, risking their lives to serve their country. I don’t like to talk about valor awards. I don’t think it’s useful to think about them. We just go to work, and it’s the work itself that tells us who we are. Our pride is no less without the fanfare.
Alfa Platoon’s little live-fire exercise against the insurgents in the sector designated Papa 12 was just the first act of a long day—one that will live in the memories of those who were there as one of the hardest days of their lives. Soon after we heard that the enemy was fleeing, a radio call came from battalion headquarters asking whether any of our guys had requested a casevac.
What the hell was this? the boys in Gold squad wondered. None of their positions had taken casualties, and if the Corregidor SEALs had gotten hit, surely they would have heard from them directly about it. What was headquarters talking about?
No one in Alfa Platoon had any idea. Then, one and all, they realized it had been a while since they had heard anything from the two elements from Camp Corregidor.
Not good.
As it happened, the enemy’s attack on Gold was part of a larger, loosely coordinated assault on all the units in the neighborhood. As Gold was wreaking havoc on the insurgents in their neighborhood, all three overwatches manned by Bravo Platoon came under simultaneous concentrated attack.
Several blocks east of Alfa Platoon’s two overwatches, Bravo had cleared and secured three different houses about two hundred yards apart as sniper positions. With a couple of Abrams tanks parked at the intersections of important streets, and the blocks cordoned off, the infantry was kicking in doors and entering houses. Bravo was set up to provide the Army a wide blanket of coverage while also staying close enough to each other to regroup and fight together if the worst came to pass. A key factor behind what happened in the hours ahead, however, was the fact that the three overwatch positions weren’t within visual sight of each other. When one of the squads decided they didn’t like the layout of the first house they took, they shifted to the one two doors over. This took them out of line of sight of their teammates. Watching the streets north of their position, they were in a house that backed up to a huge courtyard bounded by the backs of several other houses. In one of the nearby houses, they heard somebody clapping. It was an Iraqi, signaling to some pigeons—real birds, homing pigeons. We suspected the insurgents used them to tell their buddies where the Americans were. Every time we saw a pigeon flying near us, we seemed to get shot at. Like so much else about this ancient country, this stuff was straight out of the Middle Ages. We always had to assume the worst was possible.
Service: A Navy SEAL at War Page 12
